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Charhelp Helpfile
Other: charhelp Welcome to Tyr's guide to character building on buffymud. There's only one thing you can do when building a char that'll really hurt you, and that's to have your vitality seriously out of balance with your offensive stats. The most common mistake is to have quite a low vitality, the problem with this is obvious, when you have half someone's vit, you need twice their damage to make up for it. The problem being that if your strength was say 100, and you increased it by 1, that's a 1% increase, if your vit is 20, and you increase it by 1, it's a 5% increase. In short, the further apart your vit from everything else, the greater the benefit of training the lower one over the higher. Which is why a character with balanced offense and vitality is superior to one with very disporportionate offense and vitality. How much should you train your vitality? There's no definate answer to this, as a general rule of thumb almost any training system that includes vitality will do you fine, the people who get in trouble are really just the ones who just stop training vitality at some point and keep leveling up. For comparison, most highish level char's vit ranges up to around 100. Generally try to keep your vit about up to pace with your other stats and you should do well. The other mistake that's not nearly as common, is just the opposite; radically overtraining your vitality, which is bad for the exact same reasons. Other small mistakes: Overtraining ranged: Because inflicting ranged damage incurs no damage onto yourself, if a char could level just or mostly off ranged they'd lose almost no condition, which would be very overpowered. For that reason once you do a certain amount of damage to a mob from ranged, additional damage slowly diminishes. It'll never stop completely, every point of weapon skill will still increase your dam a little bit, just by less and less. For that reason it isn't practical to rely soley on ranged damage to fight your mobs, you will need a bit of other offensive stats. Obviously, lots of general magic without the magic endurance to support it is also bad. That's really it, as long as you don't make those mistakes your char will be competative. I'll go into a few details on the mechanics now, mostly just so you can know to trust that assertion. Styles, this doesn't entirely belong here, but I feel obligated to point out, since pretty much nobody seems to work it out, Mobs adapt to your styles. If you use an aikido style for a round, it is most likely the mob will use a Karate style the next round. ie they fight based on the premise you don't change style families. Firstly, demon mystic and researching, these skills do nothing combatively, however, they do increase your level, which is used in a few combat calculations, and is important in social attacks and pins. Furthermore, training these stats does not add nearly as much to your train costs as other ones. You'll notice players with heavy investment in researching or mystic have a much higher level for their comparitive total experience. So it's really not true that a char heavy in either stat can't fight nearly as well, they do have a slight disadvantage, but it's not nearly so significant as it may at first appear. All other stats increase damage at exactly the same rate per second of combat. Ranged is a little different, as it's damage is based on the same dps, but multiplyed by the average fight time. Things do flux around a little, most long timer abilities have slightly better dps ratios than short timer abilities. Fireball(20 seconds) does more damage than 4 firebolts(5 seconds each) for instance. Due to to-hit chances, physical stats do better against weaker opponents and worse against stronger ones. A buff like armored skin is weak against magic users or devils as it decreases each hit by a certain amount. To go through every stat and buff would be insane, suffice to say that they all produce the same amount of damage per second, or occationally, damage per second reduction, as any other, on average. So it's equally viable to follow ANY, and I do mean ANY training program. A slayer with magic is just as viable as the same level slayer without it, a witch with ranged weapon skill just as effective etc etc. There are literally millions of possible combinations of stat builds and characters possible. And none of them, except those noted at the start, are any worse than any other. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Category:Helpfiles